Adobe's iPhone Hail Mary

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the move to port Flash to the iPhone isn't a last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market. By allowing developers to compile existing Flash apps into native binaries, Adobe believes it has found a way around Apple's requirements that no non-Apple API interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an app, a clause that has also prevented Sun from porting JVM to the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required — if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market. But as much as Apple has at stake here, Adobe may actually have more, McAllister writes. 'Already the idea of using Web languages and tools to build smartphone applications is taking hold. Palm has built an entire smartphone platform around the idea. Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser. And developers will soon even be able to build Web-based applications for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion. As late to the game as it is, what Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options — and that could be a tough sell.'"

Comments

PHP for mobile phones

[sopssa]

Flash might be great for action games, but I'd really like to see support for PHP in some mobile phone. There's already PHP-GTK and several other frameworks that let you do it in Windows/Linux. Powerful, and still easily learned and used language would make wonders in mobile development (man does Symbian C++ suck) and because PHP has so many functions and api's build-in, it would be easy to program lots of things quickly for your phone.

Re:PHP for mobile phones

[Jurily]

No, you do all of your scripts with PHP because you're too fucking stupid or ignorant to learn a proper language like Perl, Python or Ruby.

Says the one who's too fucking stupid or ignorant to learn a proper language like C or Assembly.

Once you've moved on as a developer, and learned some decent languages, you'd see how much of a fetal abortion PHP is. It's literally a stillborn programming language.

So what? If he's quicker with it, who are you to decide he shouldn't use it? You already established you don't care about performance.

Re:PHP for mobile phones

[Anonymous Coward]

To Serious Callers Only:

We should all agree to disagree (i.e. everyone is allowed their opinion) but I just want to thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts in a civil, intelligent way.

You don't get this very often on the internet and this is only the second time I've written on Slashdot since I've been visiting starting in 2003.

Great to read :)

Re:PHP for mobile phones

[shmlco]

Don't forget the archaic parsing system that requires all variables, even those in script assignments and function parameters, to be prefixed with dollar signs. Looking at a PHP script makes me feel like I'm back in the '70s writing BASIC programs. ($A=$B vs A$=B$)

Or PHP object methods ignoring the standard dot reference convention in favor of C's pointer convention. ( obj.function() vs $obj->function() )

I know I just love typing three special characters for each and every method reference when one would do.

And you mentioned function names, but what about function parameter order? Some take the target first (arsort(array,sorttype)), and others place the target second (array_key_exists(key,array)).

Or array function names, for example, some of which start with ARRAY_map, others with Asort, and still others like CURRENT() which one can only assume does something with an array, as it could just as easily be the current time.

Or the fact that decent object support came so late to the game that 95% of all PHP code extant is still an embedded procedural spaghetti mess? Rarely does a language work so hard against writing good code. Yes, you can do it, but the odds of actually doing so pretty much equate to the chances of the Mets winning the 2009 World Series. (grin)

Re:PHP for mobile phones

[metaforest]

The real problem here is that PHP was designed to be embedded in a static web page as an 'escaped sequence.' to create dynamic html. It has evolved from that into a horrendous mess that some seem to think is a viable, general purpose scripting language.

Tying it back to a real(?) world analogy: Flat bladed screwdrivers make nice pry-bars, scrapers, and even phillips-head drivers in a pinch... but this is generally considered a bad idea: You are more likely to damage yourself, the work piece or the screwdriver if you do this.

I feel the same way about PHP. Yes you can do things with it that it was not designed to do. However using PHP this way is not really a good idea. In the long run it all ends in tears.

It's about the tools

[TheRaven64]

The flash player is a nice Smalltalk VM with a PostScript-like vector drawing model. It's a (very nice) incremental evolution of the Smalltalk 80 system. The Flash authoring app, however, is one of the best rapid application development tools on the market today. You can do everything that Flash can do with JavaScript, the canvas tag, and SVG, but there aren't (yet) any development tools that are anywhere near as nice as Flash for this environment.

Adobe doesn't make much money from the Flash player; they give away the desktop one and sell the mobile one to OEMs quite cheaply. In contrast, they charge $700 for a license for the developer tools. A lot of money, but not much in comparison to the cost of the person using them.

In the long term, the flash player will probably go away. They've already made some first steps towards this, donating the ActionScript VM to the Mozilla project, and producing things like AIR which let you run Flash apps as stand-alone binaries. I wouldn't be surprised if future versions of the Adobe Flash can target HTML5 as well as the Flash plugin, and eventually just HTML6 or a native environment.

Re:They'll lose to Gnash

[TheRaven64]

Yes, that would be a real shame for Adobe. People would be replacing a free Adobe product with an open source program to run content created with... Adobe's $700/seat authoring tools. The only reason that Adobe spends money developing the Flash player is so that they have a platform that runs (almost) everywhere and works with their authoring tools. If Gnash (which can't even handle relatively simple things like iPlayer yet) achieves 100% compatibility with Flash Player, then it just saves Adobe money supporting some less-mainstream platforms.